"Encrypt your home directory?" No (you can choose yes here, but in a closed server environment this will probably cause more head-ache then add to security)

When asked for your time zone, pick your time zone.

On Partitions disk choose Guided - use entire disk and set up LVM (Here's what LVM does).

When asked to select disk partition, usually you will only have one. By default that will be selected. Just push Enter.

"Write the change to disks and configure LVM?" Choose Yes.

For partition prompts choose defaults, how big for swap or root ect, just go with defaults. This used to be important but now with LVM and modern Linux systems this is no longer that important.

"Amount of volume group to use for guided partitioning:" Continue.

One final confirmation, "Write the changes to disk?" Yes.

HTTP proxy information. Unless you are behind a proxy (unlikely unless you on a company network), leave blank, Continue.

"How do you want to manage to upgrades on this system?" For maximum control, use, No automatic updates. For large enterprise environments consider Ubuntu Landscape.

"Choose software to install:" do not select anything. If OpenSSH server is required, make sure to use a very very strong password and switch to SSH key authentication as soon as possible. Systems can be compromised within 1 hour.

Assuming this is a new server, Yes to "Install the GRUB boot loader to the master boot record?".

Installation complete. Choose Continue to reboot the system.

Starting from a Server Hosted Solution

With most Virtual Server Hosting solutions you will be asked to select a virtual server image operating system which is then built as defined by the hosting provider. Some providers also allow you to install from a linked iso image which provides the most fined grained control and security.

Some hosting providers modify the Ubuntu Setup or only let you load a pre-configured image. In that case they are just asking for credentials.

With older hosting provider they may ask for a root password. Make sure to select a VERY complex password for the root account. It might be a little annoying, but as you walk through the article you will find that we actually stop using root altogether.

Modern Cloud servers like Microsoft Azure will create a default user account or provide option to provide your public ssh keys. For now choose password. SSH keys with how to load them into your OS will be covered later.

Server Overview

In this example, the server is a virtual machine provided by a hosting company and the following attributes,

Select a Locale

If you used a hosting company like Slice or Rackspace chances are the server image provided is minimal with no locale set. This will cause problems with Perl (used to install quite a few things) and in my case, it caused me head-aches setting up PostgreSQL.

Update Repositories

As of Ubuntu 8.10 it this has been simplified. We used to have to edit the sources.list to point your server to the universe and multi verse repository in order to install more popular packages. Now, even the minimal Server install already has what you need. So we can go straight to updating the indexes,

During the update, all the update installers are downloaded to your system and kept there for future reference in case you need to re-install. With fast connections, this is not necessary. Clean up,

sudo apt-get autoclean # use this if you only want to clean out nolonger used packages
sudo apt-get clean # clean out all downloaded packages - I usually use this one
sudo apt-get autoremove # cleans out unused packages

2 Comments

Based on what I see, the VMWare image was created with an unsupported hard disk type. Destroy the VM and create one using the wizard. Make sure to pick the appropriate Ubuntu which will ensure the right type of hard disk type is generated.